The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters

1965 children's entertainment insanity

Rating: 5/20

Plot: The titular gang races against a rival gang, fights a guy in a gorilla suit, cleans a starlet's home, and battles sinister aliens in a trio of adventures.

Look out! It's Ray Dennis Steckler, the creator of gems Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? This time, he takes a stab at kiddie entertainment, a trilogy of short films that are like The Little Rascals on mescaline. And with random monsters. In the first, they have a foot race against an antagonistic gang from another grove. They also encounter the same gorilla Rat Pfink and Boo Boo had to battle in that movie. I guess Steckler owned the suit. Or, more likely, the guy who plays Kogar the gorilla owns the suit. His name is Bob Burns, and during his sixty year career as an actor in almost 24 films, he's played Kogar the Gorilla, Gorilla Monster, or Tracey the Gorilla in eight of them. Not that he isn't versatile because he's also a mummy in one of these Lemon Grove things. And he's a "NY Stander" in Peter Jackson's King Kong movie. And he worked on special effects in the Lord of the Rings movies. This whole first adventure--crazy music, bad dubbing, cartoonish sound effects--makes for a maddening experience although it's both completely harmless and energetic enough to be watchable. There's even a Rat Pfink cameo. Oh, and Frankenstein is involved somehow. I should have probably typed "Spoiler Alert" before that though. Things pick up with a little sci-fi craziness with a sexy vampiresss and a grasshopper alien. When the latter talks, it's a beautiful thing. The former is also a beautiful thing, but I would never type that as to not invite accusations of objectification. I was totally objectifying her though. Steckler's in this himself as Gopher, the goofiest of the Lemon Grove Kids. He operates under his cool-guy moniker Cash Flagg here, and his finest moment is when he does a bunch of animal impressions. But his bad acting is overshadowed by his own daughter Laura as Tickles. Her acting almost makes it seem like she had decided at the age of five that she hated her daddy and wanted to ruin his career. Of course, she must have been a dumb five year old to not realize that her daddy didn't make very good movies in the first place. The sheer zaniness, a catchy musical number that probably took two minutes to write, and a bunch of cheap-looking monsters keeps this fun even when it's nowhere near good.

The Warriors

1979 gang movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: During a big gang get-together at a New York City park, a charismatic gang member is murdered. The titular gang is blamed. Without any weapons but their spunk, they have to return to Coney Island, preferably alive, while moving through hostile territories.

So prior to this, was the whole live-action-freeze-frame-turning-into-a-comic-book-page been done before? I liked it here even though I feel like I've seen it too much lately in other movies. I liked the variety of gangs but kind of wished there were more of them as they were more colorful than the rather boring Warriors. I can imagine the conversations they have about their gangs' themes. "Ok, so you want to go with leather vests and no shirts--headbands optional? Sounds good to me? Anybody object?" I liked the clown baseball players, the mimes, and The Orphans led by either a retarded David Schwimmer or a David Schwimmer who was beaten repeatedly with a Ralph Macchio. And then there was a scene with a long guy wearing overalls and roller skates in the subway, and wondered, "Can he technically be considered 'a gang' all by himself?" before seeing that he had some friends. David Patrick Kelly plays the main villain a little too goofily, but that little "Come out the play" bottle trick is a nice musical number. I wish the fight scenes were a little more realistic or at least choreographed. I guess there's a chaos to them that does create a sort of realism. But I don't know. A lot of the fighting looks so much like play fighting. I did like a scene where a guy in overalls gets punched, hurls himself into a wall melodramatically, has a baseball bat broken across his stomach, and then falls awkwardly onto a trash can. This is an entertaining little B-movie apparently loosely based on a historical Greek battle legend which I think means you could probably show it in school.

Idioterne (The Idiots)

1998 Von Trier joint

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Karen, a woman looking for answers and meaning in a life full of questions and futility, flees that life and joins a group of pretentious radicals calling themselves The Idiots. Led by the megalomaniacal Stoffer, they go out in public and "spazz," their term for acting like they are developmentally disabled. They make scenes in restaurants, during tours of insulation factories, at public pools, in the woods, and elsewhere. As they search for their "inner idiots," Karen tries to figure out what's going on and whether she belongs in the group or not.

First off, the self-important Lars Von Trier makes it very difficult to like his movies. He filmed this one as part of Dogme 95, an avant-garde filmmaking movement. And I expected to watch it and be reminded of a bowel movement. I don't want to spend too much time with this, but the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" includes the following rules, almost all of them strictly enforced for Idioterne:

1. On-location filming. No props.

2. No sound effects or music.

3. Hand-held camera.

4. Color but no special lighting.

5. No optical work and filters.

6. No "superficial action" (murders, weapons)

7. "Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden."

8. No genre.

9. Not widescreen.

10. No directorial credit.

Add to all of this pretentious artsy-fartsy nonsense the fact that this is a movie about people acting like they're mentally challenged, and I fully expected to kind of hate this movie. I really did. Instead, I unequivocally loved it. I honestly finished the movie and thought it was a real documentary about people who really did this. That's a testament to how great both the "story" and the acting is, the former not seeming written at all, natural and free-flowing, while the latter is the amongst the most realistic I have ever seen. At the center of this movie is Karen and her struggles although for most of the movie, she meanders around the edges of the group and has one of the least dynamic personalities of the idiots. But the action unspirals, the group's ideals are shattered, and we're left with Karen at the end, returning to her home and finishing the movie with an absolutely stunning moment that nearly made me cry. And that's strange because the majority of this movie is about as weird as anything I've ever seen. There are lots of funny Borat-like moments where the idiots interact with the unsuspecting public, but they're all moments that'll make you feel guilty while you laugh at them. That's probably Von Trier's jerky intent, making the audience uncomfortable, forcing us to leave our skin and dance around in our bones. The dogme rules don't exactly make this a comfortable experience either, and some shocking nudity and an even more shocking, and extremely graphic, orgy scene also force the audience far out of the comfort zone. Watching this without being affected in some way is impossible, and I think different people will grab different things from Idioterne. It's definitely not for everybody; in fact, I'm not sure it's for very many people at all, and a lot of people . For me, it's a shockingly original and amazing movie experience.